This year we have experienced more down time than for about 20 years. In January, 1998, James Kremer, our former Chief of Operations, gave two weeks notice that he would be leaving for a job in the software industry. Jan 30 was his last day at our facility; that day the high voltage circuit went down. We got it running at 500KV and continued to operate at that voltage until April 14, when the filament circuit went out. In early February we experienced difficulties with control of the objective aperture, but a temporary repair by Mastronarde and Morphew got us working until electronic problems shut us down. In February we advertised nationally for a new person to maintain the microscope. Twenty applications were received and the five most promising were interviewed. Our top choice was Mr. David Rinaldi, who was then working as a field engineer for JEOL (the manufacturer of our HVEM), and he had already had experience working on the HT tank of a 1000KV JEOL microscope at the National Microscope Lab. in Berkeley, CA. He accepted our offer on March 18 and began work on April 6. Although Kremer came in on several occasions to help Rinaldi get started on our scope (which is substantially older than the one with which he had experience), Rinaldi has been largely on his own. This has made his job difficult, and getting the scope working has taken much longer than we had hoped. Problems with old components in need of replacement, and significant lag times for parts delivery, have plagued our getting going again. As of September 28, we are able to operate the microscope again at 1000KV. There are minor beam instabilities which may imrpove with better alignment or may simply require time to dissipate; we are currently assessing whether these instabilities affect image quality.